January 24, 2009

No American did more to resuscitate Evelyn Waugh's reputation than the late William F. Buckley. By Waugh's death in Mod 1966, the reactionary Catholic novelist's standing had fallen almost as low as Jay McInerney's is today, yet Buckley's devotion introduced Waugh to a new generation. In Waugh's 1982 apotheosis, the monumental 13-episode Brideshead Revisited miniseries, Buckley was rightly hired to host the show on PBS.

Hence, the news that the new movie adaptation of Brideshead, Waugh's magenta-hued 1945 saga about a decadent Catholic noble family, would star the English actor Matthew Goode was intriguing. Goode (who played an amusing aristocrat in Woody Allen's "Match Point") resembles a young Buckley, especially in his express elevator eyebrows. His patrician magnetism made him a natural to play Sebastian Flyte, the charming toff who beguiles Charles Ryder, an ambitious bourgeois aesthete, when they meet at Oxford in 1923.

After Sebastian drinks himself into a monastery, Ryder's "romantic friendship" with Sebastian is followed by a mature love affair with Sebastian's sister Julia. She's unhappily married to the crass politician Rex Mottram (whom Waugh modeled on Winston Churchill's right hand man, Brendan Bracken). Rex is willing to give her a divorce, but Julia's vestigial Catholicism raises qualms in her about remarriage.

Unfortunately, the new "Brideshead Revisited" film casts Goode as the narrator, Charles Ryder, the reticent interloper dazed by the refinement of the Flyte family and their stately home Brideshead (played once again by the stupendous Castle Howard in North Yorkshire), leaving Goode few occasions to deploy his Buckleyesque facial gymnastics.

Despite that missed opportunity, the new "Brideshead Revisited" is a perfectly competent film for grown-ups, superior to last year's similar exercise in English upper crust period porn, the Best Picture nominee "Atonement."

"Atonement" invited us to indulge in the modern metasnobbery, to publicly tut-tut about the horrors of the English class system while privately wallowing in the visual splendor it created. In contrast, Waugh was an old-fashioned snob, whose only objection to class was that he should have been born into the very highest one.

While the 2008 "Brideshead Revisited" is certainly tasteful and efficient, those are just about the last words you'd associate with Waugh's grand but sprawling bestseller, half-masterpiece, half-embarrassment. Waugh had achieved near-perfection in Scoop, his 1938 satirical novel. In the more melodramatic Brideshead, however, he wore his heart on his sleeve ("The languor of Youth -- how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!"), revealing the easily bruised soul over which he had grown his carapace of malicious wit.

The new "Brideshead" is thus a good film, but not good Waugh. That's hardly surprising -- despite the enormous sums Hollywood invests in major novels by major novelists (in 1946, MGM paid Waugh $140,000 for Brideshead, but never made the film), they inevitably fail to translate fully to the screen. There's simply too much there.

It's unfortunate for the movies that the short story has almost died as an art form. As John Huston's 1975 adaptation of Kipling's short story The Man Who Would Be King demonstrated, it's often more satisfying for all concerned to expand a 20 page tale than to eviscerate a 350 page novel.

In contrast, the old miniseries certainly did Waugh justice by running an outlandish 659 minutes. In truth, that's too long; I endured the first two hours, then gave up due to the glacial pacing. As superb as the acting was, the miniseries was a relic from the Shogun era, before the universality of remote controls sapped audiences' patience. (Perhaps the producers of the new film should have simply edited the eleven-hour classic version down to 135 minutes.)

The modest attempts to modernize this 2008 Brideshead just sap the delirious momentum of the book. For example, the screenwriters concoct a scene in which Rex sells Julia to Charles in return for two paintings, as if she's his possession, causing Julia to flare up with feminist resentment. In the book, though, Julia despises Rex not because he's an antiquated patriarch, but because he's a blasé modern husband untroubled by her infidelity.

Co-screenwriter Andrew Davies, age 71, has implied that he felt ill at ease over Brideshead's Catholicism, with all that outdated distaste for divorce: why shouldn't Julia marry Charles once they've both shed their spouses? Yet, attitudes have changed once again, necessitating that the new film delete Charles's two children by his first wife to keep the adulterer a sympathetic character for today's younger audiences.

I haven't read "Brideshead Revisited", but I've read Waugh's "Decline and Fall", "Vile Bodies", "Scoop" and "Black Mischief". All four were incredibly funny and smart. I recommend them highly. The last two treat the same theme (black self-rule) in a mind-bogglingly politically incorrect manner. While reading them I often wandered how such works could be re-printed in our times.

I've heard before that Waugh turned sentimental in "Brideshead Revisited". He was anything but in his earlier novels. They are full of dry wit, elegance, snobbery and insight. The snobbery was strictly heterosexual and was a part of his comedic genius, so it doesn't grate.

it's often more satisfying for all concerned to expand a 20 page [short story] than to eviscerate a 350 page novel.

Hear, hear!

Many of the great movies began life as short stories, including one of my old favorites, "Rear Window."

The assault on plot by the literary tastemakers in New York in the middle of the XXth Century resulted in an open sewer of "mood pieces" and the kind of junk that's published in magazines today. Unfilmable. Undisgestible. And unreadable.

I fell out of the later episodes of the TV Brideshead not because the pace was slow, but because that which was being paced, the story, was either boring or unreal. The picture of the ordinary unhappy first marriage of Ryder bored me, I think, because it bored the author. And the adult romance with Julia seemed fake even to the first readers of the novel. It was Waugh wearing his religion, not his heart, on his sleeve. (Only the caricature or Mottram/Bracken seems to have interested Waugh much.)

The early episodes of Brideshead were, I think, the most sincere things Waugh ever wrote. Scoop was perfect of its kind, hilarious, beautifully-constructed nastiness. But true memories, even if they make you squirm, are better than clever carapaces. Waugh's memory of his university and immediate post-university days was fascinating because of the pain. No one minds reading the Portrait of the Artist as a young bleeding man. Readers love bloodshed, and there was plenty of emotional blood in those early episodes. I didn't know whether to run out of the room laughing or screaming during some of those early scenes.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.